Despite my slack-jawed Yorkshire twang, I have never woken up with a smile on my face, arms stretched out in glee as crisp, clear, yolk-yellow sunshine drenches my bedroom. Birds do not fly in through the shutters to pull back my patchwork quilt. I do not lean out of the window, a butterfly does not land on my index finger, and I do not break out into a song about how wonderful this country life is. That’s because my morning routine is not like the opening of a Disney movie. But when it comes to things that do make me smile? A rush of new, folksy, rosy-cheeked knitwear comes pretty close.

Over the weekend, Andrew Garfield arrived to a London screening of his new film, The Magic Faraway Tree. He was wearing a cardigan that, by all intents and purposes, was purer than an afternoon picking apples with your saintly grandfather on the family farm: It had two knitted lambs, mid-jump over a fence, on a base of lush green. Garfield and his stylist, Warren Alfie Baker, wanted something “whimsical” to match the mood of his latest movie, which is why they settled on S.S. Daley. The London designer has long mixed ’70s fits with just enough Wicker Man without it getting scary. “I’ve loved some of the independent designers that make cute sweaters, like Vivienne Westwood and JW Anderson,” Baker tells GQ. “You can’t not love a cute sweater.”

Garfield isn’t alone in loving novelty knitwear as of late. For his Saturday Night Live appearance last December, Challengers star Josh O’Connor (the perennial poster boy for Jonathan Anderson, creative director of Dior and his namesake JW) went for not one but two cute little knits. The first was light brown with a pet smiling to the front; the second was a penguin jumper direct from global animal charity WWF.

Several labels are keeping both Hollywood guys and regular guys well-stocked with happy jumpers. Over at Bode, a brand that feels like the most expensive crafternoon on the planet, creative director Emily Adams Bode Aujla has made high menswear of merry scenes. Right now, you can buy a chunky cream cardigan that has a very colourful huntsman with hunting dogs dancing around him. At Junya Watanabe, a cottage complete with a white picket fence has been knitted together. Then there’s the high street big dogs. Even at a base level, and even in their plainness, the cardigans can look a lot like something my great grandma would wear for an afternoon in front of Songs of Praise. It would be poor form not to mention Harry Styles here, too. Back in 2019, the singer-actor-general-all-rounder went for a remix of that very famous Princess Diana black sheep knit. If that’s not peak chintzy, I don’t know what it is.